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Matthew Sullivan and Simon Parker
While Australia has some of the world’s finest real estate professionals they can still learn plenty from their US peers, including the ability to accept tough market conditions, industry speaker and marketing consultant Julie Ryan has said.
Ms Ryan, who recently spoke at the National Association of Realtors (NAR) conference in California last month, doesn't deny that various markets across Australia are doing it tough.
But she told Real Estate Business the time has come for local agents to stop talking about the challenges they face, and instead to “just get on with it” – something US agents have already done to great effect.
“One of the key differences between the two countries is the US market experienced a strong rise in the lead up to the GFC, and then literally fell straight off the cliff, compared to the long and slow decline we experienced here in Australia,” Ms Ryan said.
“This means American agents have had to come to grips with market challenges much faster than we have here. In fact, we’re still talking about the market being difficult, whereas there isn’t one of my clients in the US talking about these challenges because it’s such old news.”
Ms Ryan believes once Australian principals and agents accept market challenges as “old news” and begin implementing new business initiatives to tackle these difficulties, the quicker the local industry will thrive.
“In the US they just get on with it, and they’re now going onward and upwards, which is actually really positive,” she said.
The need for local agencies to ruthlessly trim unnecessary expenses was another lesson she took from the US market, she said.
“I think it comes down to efficiency more than anything else, and that is the big lesson for us to learn as an industry, that unless we become efficient in our real estate practice we have actually got challenges.”
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